Nine Delta Students Take Top Spots in National Environmental Competition

Category: DistrictSchool

 

Nine students from Seaquam Secondary and the Delta Youth Sustainability Network (DYSN) have excelled in this year’s Young Reporters for the Environment (YRE) Canada Competition.

  • Gurleen Bhandal, Srishti Singh and Navreen Sekhon won first place in the Photography Category (ages 15-18) with their submission The Future of Our World. Click here to see their photo.
  • Bailey Yi won second place in the Essay Category (ages 15-18) with her submission A Sea of Foam: The Invisible Dangers of EPS. Click here to read her essay.
  • Tim (Ziyi) Zou and Clark (Chenhao) Du won second place in the Video Category (ages 15-18) with their submission Light Pollution: The Light and the Night. Click here to see their video.
  • Maggie Barrett, Charlotte Shortt, and Katelyn Owsnett won third place in the Photography Category (ages 15-18) with their submission Our Carbon Footprint Around the World. Click here to see their photo.

This is the fifth straight year that Delta students have placed highly in the competition. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year the students had the added challenge of needing to work collaboratively while remaining physically apart. Congratulations to all of our talented students for their submissions! You can see all of the winning entries on the YRE website: https://ecoschools.ca/yre/2020-winners/

“What we enjoyed most about taking part in YRE was the creative ability to express our concern for climate justice in a way we felt would be most effective in reaching other students and community members. It allowed us to not only research within the topic we had chosen, but go beyond and really try to understand how climate change impacts different parts of the world, and what steps we should take towards a more sustainable future.” – Navreen Sekhon, Gurleen Bhandal and Srishti Singh, who won first place with their photography submission.


“Motivation-wise, I wanted to try engaging with my community outside of typical volunteering activities while still staying somewhat within my comfort zone. In the end, I decided that a competition like YRE—which combined my pre-existing interest in writing with something new like environmental reporting—would be a fantastic place to start! During the research process, I enjoyed talking to representatives of the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup,” –  Bailey Yi, who won second place with her essay submission.

As well as having their work featured on the YRE website and announced nationally through www.Ecoschools.ca and social media, the winners will also be featured in the online environmental journal ENV Media. They will also be invited to speak at international sustainability conferences around the world. Past winners from Seaquam Secondary have attended and presented at the following conferences:

  • 2018 Southeastern Environmental Education Alliance (SEEA) Conference hosted by the League of Environmental Educators in Florida (LEEF)
  • 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference hosted by the North American Association of Environmental Educators in Spokane, Washington
  • 2017 United Nations 9th World Environmental Education Congress conference in Vancouver
  • Global 2019 Sustainability Conference in Thailand
  • 2016 YRE International Conference in Toronto

About YRE

Young Reporters for the Environment (YRE) is an award-winning program coordinated by Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE). The program empowers young people to take an educated stand on environmental issues they feel strongly about and gives them a platform to articulate these issues through the media of writing, photography or video. YRE is active in 45 countries and engages more than 360,000 young reporters.